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Wednesday, June 22, 2016

My School Year {TOS Review}

As my children are getting older, I'm finding the need to keep more detailed records of their schoolwork, activities and books they've read. I want to have a really nice transcript to present to a college or at their "graduation". When I was chosen to review MySchoolYear.com, I was anxious to see what they offered for record keeping. I was given the My School Year (Homeschool Record Keeping) Annual Membership.

WHAT IS MYSCHOOLYEAR.COM?

MySchoolYear.com is a website that offers many different tools to help keep you and your homeschool organized. In simple terms, it is an online lesson planner and record keeper! Here is a list of the things MySchoolYear.com provides along with a short description:

I used MySchoolYear.com mainly to track extra-curricular activities and reading logs for my children. I planned on using the Lesson Plan Generators to create lesson plans for my children. However, we don't use a "do the next lesson" type of homeschool, so the Quick Split or Rapid Repeat options wouldn't work for us. {Quick Split divides a book into sections by days or lessons; Rapid Repeat repeats an assignments with new lesson numbers.} It was too time-consuming to try to type in all of the details and information for each lesson for my each of my children. If your lessons consist of diving a book into sections or doing the next lesson each day, it would be quick to generate lesson plans.

I added each of my children and their "classes" for the year. Once I did that, I realized I wasn't going to add the lessons or create lesson plans. So I just started tracking books read and volunteer work. I tried tracking some of their sports, like karate, and it was too confusing. I had to put some information in that wasn't relevant, like "Total Hours" and a "Start Date" and "End Date". They've been taking for a while, and I don't know how many hours they've taken! They haven't ended it yet, either. So I was a little frustrated trying to figure that out, because you have to input that information.

The Reading Log was pretty easy. There is plenty of information you can type in, like page numbers, start and end dates, type of book, price and more. There is also the option to just input the book title and completion date, which is what I did.

The Volunteer Work was easy to keep track of, and I hope motivating to my kids to get out there and do some more service work! Seeing it in print always makes you want to do more.

WHAT I THINK OF MYSCHOOLYEAR.COM:

Honestly, I am not very impressed with MySchoolYear.com. It doesn't fit our homeschool needs at this time. I found it inconvenient and unnecessary. I like the idea behind this program - I love the idea of keeping a reading log for each of my kids, tracking their volunteer work and extra-curricular activities, and keeping records of their attendance and hours. It would be very helpful to have all of this information in one place, especially as my children grow older and have more things to keep track of. It is mobile-friendly, which is a plus if your family is on the go quite a bit.

The Teacher's Aid that provided the helpful reminders did help me figure out quite a bit. I wasn't sure exactly what I was doing at first. The Teacher's Aid gave me some suggestions, like "Does Mikaela have any extra-curricular activities to add?" or "Eli needs lessons for America the Beautiful."

My overall opinion is this: If you have children with a "lesson-a-day" type of school-work, this would work for you. However, we don't, and it will not work for our family. Take a look for yourself, though! Check out MySchoolYear.com!

2 comments:

We wanted to make you aware of something that you wrote. When entering in organization information (like karate), only “Start Date” is required. “End Date” and “Total Hours” are available (optional) but not required.

You hit it right on target with respect to other uses for tracking. We even have a blog on it. https://www.myschoolyear.com/blog/staying-on-track-with-my-school-year/ As a homeschool dad with my eldest going off to college, having those records at the click of a button allowed her to easily apply for more scholarships that required this information. It literally generated thousands of dollars for us.

As a reminder, if you ever need assistance while on the site, we have both a support email and a toll-free support line. That contact info is located on every screen.